Sunday, January 25, 2015

I am in love with Lua as blogged previously. While it is perfect little language, there is scope for improving the performance of Lua. Obviously great work in this area has already been done by Mike Pall who created Luajit. However, there are some issues with Luajit that are hard to overcome.

Large parts of Luajit are written in assembler - which means that it would take significant investment of time and effort to understand how it works and fix issues or make enhancements to it.

Mike Pall is undoubtedly a genius, but he is the sole developer of Luajit. The latest version 2.1 has not been released yet as Mike is presumably working on other things as reported on his sponsorship page. So the destiny of Luajit is pretty much tied up with how much effort Mike puts into Luajit.

Luajit was based on Lua 5.1, and for good reasons it has stayed compatible with 5.1, avoiding ABI incompatible features in later versions. But this is increasingly going to be a problem as newer versions of Lua introduce new features.

Luajit's FFI is great but not compatible with Lua, so any code exploiting FFI is not compatible with Lua.

So my solution to above is to enhance core Lua to support optional typing so that the VM can use type specific bytecode. This will hopefully help the interpreter performance but more importantly it will enable simple JIT compilation of performance critical functions.

I am naming this new dialect of Lua as Ravi. Full details of the project can be found at the Ravi github site.